Sure, they were young punks from ’round London way. Their lead singer had himself a nasty heroin bit, and their U.S. label duped ’em over when it came down to translating their U.K. successes for overseas ears. Just don’t go thinkin’ that these four blokes had anything to do with dog collars and Crass-style send-ups. Nuh uh; this was a rock band, plain and simple — actually, better than that.
Led by pin-up Pixie Peter Perrett and a rhythm section that boasted ex-members of such bands as Spooky Tooth and Peter Frampton, The Only Ones wrote complex yet instinctively hummable tunes about love and loss like they were going out of style. In Perrett, they had the quintessential frontman, all gangly, strung out, egotistical and whiny but a talented-enough songwriter to convince the guys to keep him on board for three studio albums between 1976 and ’81. Live was a different story: Think of these drunken, sloppy rockers as the Cockneyed precursors to The Replacements, who actually made The Only Ones’ second single, “Another Girl, Another Planet,” a staple cover.
Musically, they don’t really blow listeners away with anything. Although Perrett’s disaffected, nasally delivery recalls that of Television’s Richard Lloyd, the guitar techniques are far too elementary to mirror those of that band ... plus, most tracks revel in concise three- to four-minute pop glory. “Another Girl ... “ might be darn near New Wave, but “Lovers of Today,” the band’s first single and one of NME’s top 100 indie releases of all time, is a D.I.Y.-era anthem. Find room for “Whole of the Law,” a country-tinged ballad, too. Yo La Tengo covered it for the Painful CD.
Special View, the band’s first U.S. release, features these three tracks plus a few other gems culled from its first two U.K. releases, The Only Ones(1978) and Even Serpents Shine (1979). “Peter and the Pets” portrays the band at its sassiest, as the self-reflexive lyrics not only jostle with Perrett’s hungover-ringmaster image but also turn it totally off its axis when the singer starts bellowing of “Peter and the Perretts.” “Out There In the Night” is a shiny-yet-dark tale of a prostitute that unfortunately owes a lot to Badfinger’s “Midnight Caller.” This take on streetwalker sympathy, though, has a better hook.
Following a third new studio album, the band split up, and a supposedly cleaned-up Perrett re-emerged in 1994 with a new band, creatively called The One. After putting out two CDs under that moniker, Perrett retreated again to seclusion. For the past seven years or so, he has taken up hibernation in an estate coined the Perrett Towers by a still-growing collective of Only Ones aficionados.
- Scott Joplin
